Dispersion in statistics describes the spread of the data values in a given dataset. In other words, it shows how the data is “dispersed” around the mean (the central value). When you’re finding the mode for a set of numbers, the mode is the number in the data set that appears the most times. Simply said, the median is the middle value in a data set. As you might guess, in order to calculate the middle, you need: –  first listing the data in a numerical order – second, locating the value in the middle of the list. Central tendency tells us important information but it doesn’t show everything we want to know about average values. Central tendency fails to reveal the extent to which the values of the individual items differ in a data set. They are typically presented graphically, in tabular form or as summary statistics. For example, With 10,000 people, the mean salary might be $45,000, but the range is $20,000 to $3,000,000 with a mean of $100,000. That is why the mode of this data set is 55 years. Let’s say you have a sample of 5 girls and 6 boys. Without descriptive statistics the data that we have would be hard to summarize, especially when it is on the large side. In sports, descriptive statistics could be used in gathering information about a basketball player’s performance based on the individual numbers tallied, such as points scored, blocks, and rebounds, during a … Here you will find in-depth articles, real-world examples, and top software tools to help you use data potential. Quality testing is another important use of statistics in every area of life. Another important thing to remember about the median is when you have an even number in your data set. An example of descriptive statistics would be … The mode of a set of data is the number in the set that occurs most often. It’s easy to perform the arithmetic for the mean, median, and mode. In the above example, if we order the retirement age from lowest to the highest, would see that the centre of the data set is 57 years, but the mode is lower, at 53 years. range and standard deviation). Here are some hints: Having trouble deciding which measure to use when you have nominal, ordinal or interval data? Easily – you just need to find the average of the two middle numbers. You are simply summarizing the data with charts, tables, and graphs. In terms of measures of central tendency, this is all there is to descriptive statistics. Consider you have a dataset with the retirement age of 10 people, in whole years: To illustrate this let’s see table below that shows the frequency of the retirement age data. Intellspot.com is one hub for everyone involved in the data space – from data scientists to marketers and business managers. The most familiar of On a day-to-day basis, we conduct quality… And a high range shows the opposite. If in a given country there are very poor people and very rich people, we say there is serious economic disparity. Master statistics & machine learning: intuition, math, code. The range is simply the difference between the largest and smallest value in a data set. It shows how much variation from the average exists. There are several forms of statistical analysis you can perform, such as inferential statistics, which is used to predict what the data may be in the future. INTERPRETATION You are most likely to be familiar with this branch of statistics because many examples arise in everyday life. If we use the math results from Example 6: You see that the data values in Group A are much closer to the mean than the ones in Group B. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Together with some plain graphics analysis, they form a solid basis for almost every quantitative analysis of data. A key factor to remember about data sets is that they should always be placed in order. Note that you are not drawing any conclusions about the full population. As an advantage of the median, we can say that it is less reflected by outliers and skewed data than the mean. Note: The above formula is for a sample of a population. The standard deviation of an entire population is represented by the Greek lowercase letter sigma and looks like that: More examples of Standard Deviation, you can see in the Explorable site. Notice that some of the numbers repeat. Both of these groups have mean scores of 60. Descriptive statistics can be difficult to deal with when you’re dealing with a large set of data, but the amount of work done for each equation is actually pretty simple. The mode has one very important advantage over the median and the mean. The average is the addition of all the numbers in the data set and then having those numbers divided by the number of numbers within that set. Descriptive statistics are very vital because it helps us in presenting data in a manner that can be easily visualized by people. You can, make conclusions with that data. CONCEPT The branch of statistics that focuses on collecting, summarizing, and presenting a set of data. Your result is the answer. In fact, for many of these forms of descriptive statistics, you don’t have to do any arithmetic at all. Conversely, with inferential statistics, you are using statistics to test a hypothesis, draw conclusions and make predictions about a whole population, based on your sample. Descriptive statistics serves as the basis for analysis and discussion in fields as diverse as securities trading, the social sciences, government, the health sciences, and professional sports. You cannot work with the mean when you have nominal data (see our post about nominal vs ordinal data). Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your browser. Descriptive statistics help you to simplify large amounts of data in a meaningful way. The final part of descriptive statistics that you will learn about is finding the mean or the average. It allows a simpler interpretation of the data. This, therefore means, the data can be easily absorbed by people. It tells us what is normal or average for a given set of data. There are three key methods to show central tendency: mean, mode, and median. In order to post comments, please make sure JavaScript and Cookies are enabled, and reload the page. Now you would think that the median would be 13, since it sits in the middle of the data set, but this isn’t the case. Descriptive statistics is a form of analysis that helps you by describing, summarizing, or showing data in a meaningful way. In this instance, 53 is the mode since it appears 3 times in the data set, which is more than any of the other numbers. When put in its simplest terms, descriptive statistics is pretty easy to understand. 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